Susan Fainstein

Born in 1938, awarded a doctorate at MIT and a professor at Rutgers, Columbia and Harvard, where she taught urban planning until her retirement, Fainstein first studied the large real estate projects of New York and London in The City Builders (1994), where she showed how 1980s planning put itself at the service of developers, and edited with Dennis Judd The Tourist City (1999), on cities remade for the visitor.

The Just City (2010) is her major work. Against planning that promises growth and theory that only denounces, she proposes judging urban policies by three criteria, equity, democracy and diversity, and applies them to New York, London and Amsterdam to conclude that Amsterdam, with its social housing and its control of land, is the fairest city of the three. Her inspiration is John Rawls, and her audience the planners who decide every day.

She has been one of the main voices of urban regime theory and of the critique of communicative planning, which she reproaches for trusting dialogue without looking at outcomes. Her question, just for whom, has become a criterion for evaluating urban projects around the world, and Searching for the Just City (2009), edited with Peter Marcuse and others, gathered the debate her work opened.